#hokkien — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #hokkien, aggregated by home.social.
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Of abandoning mother tongues and shame
ℹ️ Now, a caveat before I go on. There’s a common narrative on left-leaning US-dominated social media that there’s a concerted effort by Beijing to stamp out native languages. This interpretation is false and propaganda, and this writer is not in the mood to educate or argue with these believers right now, and as I don’t want this thread to be hijacked by an agenda, I’ll be moderating the comments.
This will be my only attempt at educating people on the subject: Even in Malaysia, Chinese dialects are fading, being replaced by Mandarin. There’s no concerted effort by the Malaysian government to stamp out Chinese dialects. This is all due to the power of peer and family pressure. Self-inflicted, almost. Kids feel pressured to adopt the perceived “elite language” at school or even at home. And if parents do not make a concerted effort to educate their children in the native tongue, it’ll fade.
It happened in my family, with my siblings being total bananas, preferring to communicate most of the time in English while I am can converse in Hokkien (a Chinese language dominant in China’s Fujian province) and Mandarin. This was a choice on my part to keep learning Mandarin and speaking in Hokkien. My siblings just didn’t think it a priority, that’s all. It’s no biggie. It’s just a personal choice every individual in Malaysia may make. Now on to the essay.Yaqi Li’s essay, Reversed Tones and Borrowed Tongues fascinated me because, as a Malaysian, I grew up in an environment where we end up using multiple languages.
I thought long and hard about whether I was ever ashamed speaking Hokkien, and the short answer is, No.
In fact, I’d be surprised if any Malaysian-Chinese would feel ashamed speaking their native tongue. For as long as I lived, the Malaysian Chinese community had been fiercely determined to preserve their traditions, and that included speaking their native tongues. If anything, they’d frown at anyone who look down on their mother tongue.
The pressure and “shame” I feel is that I was never fast or smart enough to master more languages. For example, having lived in Kuala Lumpur for most of my life, I am often side-eyed for not bothering to learn Cantonese.
Malaysia’s unique education system—we have schools whose primary languages are either English (private schools), Malay (national schools), Chinese or Indian (vernacular schools)—meant that there’s no one Malaysian with the same command of language in any language.
My strongest language is English despite being in a Malay-dominated national school because my family are Penang Peranakans who are Anglophiles. Even before Malaysia’s independence, the Penang Peranakans spoke English and sent our kids to missionary schools.
At home, my parents and I speak a mixture of English and Hokkien. Among my siblings, I’m the most fluent in Hokkien and Mandarin. Mandarin was a ‘chance of geography’. I grew up in Johor, but unlike my siblings, I just naturally learned Mandarin while they didn’t.
The Peranakans are Chinese, but we don’t really feel inferior or ashamed for not speaking Mandarin or our native mother tongue because it’s understood that most of us can’t. The Malacca Peranakans, for example, mostly speak Malay.
One of the excuses I give when a Chinese-educated Malaysian-Chinese scoff at me for not speaking Mandarin fluently is that I am Peranakan. A look of understanding will dawn on their faces and they will say, “Oh no wonder.”
They’re not as forgiving for complete Chinese bananas, however. They just cannot comprehend Chinese people who do not bother preserving their mother tongues.
We also don’t feel any shame/superiority/inferiority for learning a language. When you are a Peranakan, whose culture is a blend of myriad cultures including Chinese, Malay, Thai and even British, there’s really little shame in learning a language. As I said, if anything, our shame comes from not learning more languages than we should!
I’m an odd duck in that I have really good accents in my languages (great Malay and Mandarin accents) but my vocabulary sucks. My accent makes up for it, fooling many native speakers into thinking I’m native like them.
So, in summary, Malaysians generally don’t really have an identity crisis over our mastery of language. However, language is politicized, with Malay trying to maintain its primacy in an English-dominated world, made even more complicated by a language-fractured education system and a population whose mastery of Malay isn’t standard or homogeneous.
But I hear that among the Chinese educated, they do feel bad if they can’t master English. But again, only because they are supposed to. They understand how important it is to master English and their mastery of it will determine their success in business.
But again, when most of Malaysian society is multilingual, able to switch to multiple languages (sometimes in one sentence), the shame comes from not mastering a language fast enough or adding more languages to your skillset.
#languages #Chinese #Culture #Mandarin #Hokkien #Malaysia
#BahasaMalaysia #China #Chinese #ChineseCulture #Hokkien #LanguageLearning #Malaysia #Mandarin -
https://www.wacoca.com/videos/3178386/travel-thirsty/ Travel Thirsty: ALIEN PEACOCK MANTIS SHRIMP Chinese Street Food Xiamen China #ALIEN #AlienShrimp #china #ChinaStreetFood #chinese #ChineseFood #ChineseStreetFood #food #fujian #hokkien #mantis #MantisShrimp #PEACOCK #PeacockMantisShrimp #PissingShrimp #prawn #prawns #RainbowShrimp #seafood #shrimp #Street #StreetFood #Thirsty #travel #TravelThirsty #TravelThirsty #Vlog #Vlogger #xiamen #YouTube #YouTuber
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I always struggle with calling bubble tea ‘boba’ because in my native language (and Taiwan’s) it means ‘big boobs’
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Lmao I am on a roll. Tickled pink that Liu Yuning, Zhou Shen and various Chinese musicians are speaking Hokkien in this clip.
Btw the dude with the hat is speaking my type of Hokkien! Kaki lang!
王琳凯教刘宇宁闽南语一个敢学一个敢教 #刘宇宁小鬼一... http://xhslink.com/o/9G5ikLc1mxa
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Such a cute video!
Guy - Zhangzhou Hokkien, older lady - Xiamen Hokkien. Kid - Mandarin (though learning from both!)
100% understand the guy! It's so comforting to know I can be understood in one part of China 😆. Apparently the Hokkien I speak is from Zhangzhou.
Tho I noticed they do use different words for somethings. Penang Hokkien has lots of loan words from English and Malay 😅
Source: 闽南语的不同口音！ http://xhslink.com/o/7I5tcQJWnGK
#Penang #Hokkien #China #Chinese #Languages #Xiaohongshu #RedNote
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To add to the confusion in terms of Chinese languages/dialects, there are variants of Hokkien. I, for the life of me, could not understand the thick accents of Taiwanese and most of Fujian's Hokkien.
Apparently Penang Hokkiens are descendents of Zhangzhou Fujianese, so I went digging for a clip.
The last guy is definitely a brother from another mother!
It's kinda funny how different Zhangzhou Hokkien is from the others 😆
Ok now I want to go to Zhangzhou, China to see if they understand my Hokkien! it's nice to know if I go to China there's a tiny part of the country that understands my dialect.
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I can actually understand it! Well, ok almost; their accent makes it difficult for me to completely understand them. (My version of Hokkien has a very, very different accent.) Cool that Fujian aka Hokkien is kinda similar to my Hokkien
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Still loving this song. Ironically I understand the Cantonese lyrics better than the Teochew one.* I thought the Hakka version of the song was the most beautiful.
* I say ironically because Hokkien is a close cousin of Teochew, so I should understand what she's saying but I don't. Probably because Penang Hokkien is a Creole version that is probably not understandable to anyone outside Malaysia 😆
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Das ist eine der selteneren Versionen meines Songs! Die taiwanesische (Hokkien) Adaptation von "Was uns verbindet" hat einen ganz eigenen musikalischen Charakter. Ein spezieller Gruß an Taiwanesisch-Sprecher – #Taiwanese #Hokkien #SelteneSprachen https://youtu.be/CW06X_fJmKU?si=ocnwq2028rd8BTtT
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Had my first early #Christmas get-together on Saturday evening. The closer to Christmas, the busier people are, and the worse traffic gets. So we like to be early. 🤪
'Twas a lovely evening. 😊
I learned something new!Mi-sòaⁿ Chhin / 麵線親 / 面线亲
I'm translating it as "noodle relative/s". 😄 It's about relations like in #SixDegrees but with some relatives in the [thin] connecting threads. #Chinese #Fujian #Minnan #Hokkien #family
Do you folks have a similar thing in your #language? 😃
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@dlupham
You said: "What is so different about the Taiwanese dialect of Hokkien that it needs a different name?" I gave you direct answers with the examples of #Québecois (which uses a different name from #French 🇫🇷) and #Taiwanese 🇳🇫 which contains many words not used in #Hokkien 🇨🇳 (Does #Cockney deserve its own name?), and you're still not satisified. -
@dlupham @focus_taiwan_en
Ever heard of "#Québecois"?
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/quebecois
What is different about #Taiwanese 🇳🇫 and #Hokkien 🇨🇳?
(Same link I sent earlier. Did you even check it out?)
https://discover.hubpages.com/education/The-Taiwanese-Language-Words-Borrowed-From-Japanese-And-Other-Languages -
@focus_taiwan_en
If "#Hokkien" is "commonly known as #Taiwanese," why don't you just call it that?
#福佬語
#Tâigí
#台語
#WordsDoMeanThings -
I have a whole bunch of marine puns in a different language that I doubt more than 1 other person at work would understand.
In Taiwanese / Hokkien,
‘Hae’ means shrimp
‘Heh’ means fishSo since I was a child my cousins and I have always been saying shrimp shrimp shrimp or fish fish fish for ‘hehehehe’ laughing
It was meant to be
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@jkn I've always been under the impression (and noticed in my travels) that #Taiwanese #Hokkien is more widely used in the South, no? Or do you mean the dialect itself is unique compared to your Hokkien?